BILLTESKA

Each season of the Church year emphasizes a part of sacred reality ~ another side of the truth that God is Love, that God reigns, and that all is well. Advent emphasizes the radical, insane nature of this hope. All evidence points to the contrary. “People fainting from fear and foreboding of what is coming on the earth.” But we are to rejoice ~ even in these, the worst of times ~ to rejoice and give thanks, to “stand up and raise [our] heads, because [our] redemption is drawing near.”

To redeem is to buy back. In the case of a slave, it means to set free, and that’s what it means here: the liberation of humanity and the cosmos, the Victory of life over death, of light over darkness. The Victor is invincible and He is a human being ~ the One like unto a Son of Man of Daniel’s night visions, the One to Whom the Ancient of Days gives dominion and glory and kingship, the One Who comes in clouds of glory, surrounded by the Holy Angels.

According to the Holy Prophet Zechariah, His feet shall stand upon the Mount of Olives, which lies before Jerusalem on the east. This is a very specific geographical detail, and if you go to Jerusalem, you can go up on the ridge called the Mount of Olives and you will see that it is covered with cemeteries. That’s because believers of all three Abrahamic faiths want to await the Advent of the Lord in the place where He will stand just before His entry into Jerusalem to inaugurate His Reign on earth. As you look west over the cemeteries and the Kidron valley to the city wall beyond and the Dome of the Rock that stands where the old Temple once stood, you can make out in the eastern wall a huge, bricked-up arch. This is called the Golden Gate, because it is thought to be the portal of the Messiah on the Day of Battle.

What battle? Some modern literalists understand it as an actual military conflict between historical powers; but according to the Apocalypse, that great conflict is scheduled to occur somewhere else: up north on the Plain of Jezreel, outside Haifa near a place called Megiddo. This Armageddon of the apocalyptic vision was the site of a good many cataclysmic battles in ancient times. Anyway, apocalyptic literalism is always a dead-end. The battle about to be joined by the Son of Man standing on the Mount of Olives is something else, another kind of struggle, something even bigger than a fight to the death between two great armies. The military imagery of Zechariah’s prophecy shows the influence of Zoroastrianism ~ maybe even of its offshoot, Mithraism. It is a way of expressing hope in a re-ordering of the cosmos, a restructuring of the world itself: the Mount of Olives is re-arranged, day and night are abolished, replaced by continuous Light. This End of the World is not destruction but re-creation, the final Victory of Light and Life ~ overflowing Life.

Living waters shall flow out of Jerusalem, half of them to the Eastern Sea and half of them to the Western Sea; it shall continue summer as in winter. And the LORD will become King over all the earth; on that Day the LORD will be one and His Name one.

One Christian interpretation of these passages is called realized eschatology. (Eschatology being the department of theology that covers the end of the world, this means that the predicted end of the world has already happened: that it has been realized.) The Son of Man has already stood upon the Mount of Olives, where He directed His disciples to go find the colt of an ass, which He then rode through the Golden Gate up into the Temple, accepting the shouts of messianic greeting: Hosanna to the Son of David. Later, He would sweat blood in the dark garden down the mountain a bit, before He was led again through the gate to His trial before the High Priest.

On the other side of the Temple Mount there is another ridge called Mount Zion, which lies before Jerusalem to the West. On one end of it, in a high place called Golgotha, the final Victory was won. From the Victor’s throne flowed Blood and Water: Living Water to the east and to the west. Redemption has occurred, Living Water flows out of Jerusalem, and history is over, according to realized eschatology. All the centuries since then are insignificant, adding nothing of importance to the Divine Comedy. Just more souls, more lives, more persons to enjoy God forever. This was ~ more or less ~ the Medieval view.

Modern consciousness has a renewed interest in an apocalyptic future, however. This interest has a well-known vulgar, fundamentalist form and a more sophisticated scientific (some might say pseudo-scientific) form. Fundamentalism takes it all literally, tries to parse the visionary, almost hallucinatory images and to calculate the day and the hour. Modern secular thought, on the other hand, has the notion of progress. The powerful idea that human events ~ and even natural processes, such as evolution ~ are a theater for meaningful change and improvement from one level to another is very much with us. It is silly to say that it died with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Much as the so-called postmodernists want to expunge any hint of progressivism from scientific thinking, I doubt that human beings will ever stop hoping for a better day, a better future for their children. The hope that a better world is possible can be traced to the apocalyptic consciousness of late post-Exilic Judaism and early Christianity: tomorrow does not have to be a repeat of today, tomorrow can be utterly different and unimaginably better. No darkness, only continuous light, and the defeat of death itself ~ drowned like Pharaoh’s army in the flood of living waters issuing from Jerusalem.

The great collect for today, the First Sunday of the Church year, calls us to clothe ourselves in the light of this hope, as though it were armor for the battle; to cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. This is not an exhortation to moral rectitude, but a call to higher consciousness; a call to resist the despair that comes with thinking that things are as they seem; to cast away the darkness that can only observe the fact that things are getting steadily worse; a call to repent, to change our mind about the nature of reality, and to recognize that natural process of decay and death ~ the law of entropy which decrees that everything is running down to an ultimately motionless stasis ~ is not the lord of the universe; and a call to rejoice in the signs of even the worst of times as one rejoices in the green buds of a fruit tree in the Spring; a call to recognize that Redemption is not something that comes out of the nature unfolding in a historical, or biological or any other kind of process, but from the Love of God; and a call to stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing nigh.

The great American preacher, Jonathan Edwards, once compared our relationship to God as that of a loathsome spider held in a man’s hands:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

While I think the Reverend Mr. Edwards mistaken about the Divine Disposition towards us, His children, and altogether misguided in his attempt to frighten his congregation regarding it, his analogy is thus far useful: how would you go about communicating with a spider or an insect? It is not endowed with the means of dialogue. The gap in being is just too great. But the gap between the person and the spider he is holding over the fire is nothing compared to the distance between God and us. If it were not for God’s love, we would know nothing of God at all. As it is, we can speak of God only in analogies to our own experience: God is like a mother and father ~ like the father of the Prodigal Son; God the Beloved, God the Friend; God the King.

When One Ancient of Days sent one Like Unto a Son of Man to us, He had to use analogies ~ parables ~ even with people whose hearts were open and ready to hear the Good News. But even Almighty God could not communicate with someone who didn’t want the News. In today’s Gospel, the Word of God ~ Communication Incarnate ~ stands face to face with such a man. There is nothing He can do to pierce Pilate’s indifferent consciousness. After a brief attempt, the Word falls silent. Throughout the Gospel, he is anything but silent, but after the exchange we hear today, with Pilate He is silent.

Jesus gives Pilate the opportunity to find out. Maybe this Roman has some genuine interest ~ curiosity at least ~ so He asks Pilate if the question was authentic, or just bureaucratic investigation:

Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?

Well, obviously others HAD told Pilate about Jesus; the question was intended to learn whether or not Pilate had any real interest. His answer is brusque and arrogant:

Do I look like a Jew to you? Am I interested in your barbaric superstitions? Your own people have turned you in. Now, what have you done?

Pilate can think only in terms of his own role as a Roman magistrate, He has a certain concept of what a King is, and Jesus’ only answer is that the analogy while appropriate, falls far short of the reality: His kind of Kingship is beyond anything Pilate could imagine. Up to this point, Jesus is giving Pilate the opportunity to step out of his role as Roman governor, to shake off his illusions about his little, worldly identity and his own power. But Pilate won’t. He misses the great chance, and treats the whole encounter as a police matter

So you ARE a King, then?

That is what YOU say; that’s YOUR word for it; that’s what YOU call me. I was born for this, to bear witness to the truth.

Today’s pericope stops there, but the narrative continues with Pilate’s rhetorical question: What is truth? By which he meant there is no such thing as truth, only power. Pilate was a good postmodern skeptic. After that remark, Jesus stood mute before him, there was nothing even the Word of God Incarnate could do for him ~ no teaching, no healing, no miraculous enlightenment. Except to correct him when he claimed power over Jesus: You have no power at all except what is given to you from above. In other words, You are a deluded hack, as worldly rulers usually are: hacks who are no more significant than a cloud of gnats ~ or Edwards’s spider ~ whose pomp is evanescent and ridiculous, whose power, when used for unjust purposes, consumes itself: devours itself and collapses. (American power is no exception, as current events so painfully reveal.)

Throughout the ages, Pilate never learns. He’s not a particularly bad man. His wife has worried him about her disturbing dreams, and he may even want to release Jesus, but the situation won’t permit it. It’s too unstable, If he can cool it by a minor injustice, the end justifies the means. He is just doing his job. He typifies Hannah Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann: the banality of evil. There is nothing big or superhuman about Pilate. Nothing even worthy of comment from the One he is about to condemn. But in doing his dirty little, bureaucratic job, Pilate becomes the instrument of the Victory of God over every tyranny, including his own. He orders the Tomb to be sealed, but the wax that bears the image of Cæsar will shatter on Easter morning. Pilate’s unjust sentence condemns not the Godman but his own power. He has, in fact no power save from a Source he does not recognize. He has power to crucify Jesus, but every blow of the executioners’ hammer secures Christ’s Kingdom and dooms Cæsar’s. Pilate scoffs at the very idea of truth, but unwittingly becomes its witness, proclaiming to the world for all time, in the notice written by his own hand:

I sometimes think of today’s collect as a kind of dare: all scripture is written for our learning. So, you’d better listen hard ~ and then come the frightful predictions in the readings. The lectionary seems to be saying to us, “Ha! If you’re so smart, make something out of this!” The gospel is sometimes called the Little Apocalypse, and it is paired with the Book of the Holy Prophet Daniel, that mother of all apocalyptic texts.

[By the way, apocalyptic writing is called that because it’s subject matter and style are like the famous book called The Apocalypse, which means Revelation. The subject is the end of the world and the style is full of fire and brimstone and large, colorful, supernatural images. Because apocalyptic literature deals with the End, the word apocalypse is commonly used as a synonym for the End, but it really means a revelation about the End.]

Anyway, that kind of literature was the science fiction of its time, and I have a feeling that these popular stories were repeated for entertainment. But behind them also lay a political message: the rulers of this age are in for a big surprise, and an unpleasant one ~ cataclysm, disaster, and total destruction. This is to be followed by the heavenly deliverance of the poor and oppressed by the creation of a New World , God’s Kingdom of peace and justice. As far a we know, the earliest Christians believed all this was going to happen in their own lifetime. The first persecution under Nero and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem seemed to confirm the expectation. But Time didn’t end. No Second Coming ~ no literal destruction and re-creation of heaven and earth, so interpretation became necessary. These were of three general types, which I will call Mañana, Now, and In-My-Heart.

Mañana says “not now, but someday in the distant future the world will end (or maybe tomorrow, but don’t bet on it).” Now says “”OK, it took longer than we thought, but it really is happening now.” And In-My-Heart applies cosmic doom to one's own inner life and mortality: “The world is always coming to an end for each one of us as individuals.”

We Americans have a special relationship to apocalyptic thinking. For a thousand years ~ roughly from Constantine to the Protestant Reformation (and beyond that in Byzantium and Russia) ~ Christians pretty much thought, mañana, “later.” The Reformation produced such horrible persecution and war that many of the more extreme Protestants were sure that the tribulation of the end times was upon them. They brought this consciousness with them to the New World, and it is alive and well in our own generation. Our very designation of our country as the New World arises out of this consciousness. The fascinating history of American Protestantism, especially in its home-grown varieties, reveals a thoroughgoing apocalyptic sensibility. This is true of left as well as right. In fact, until recently, it was progressives who were really apocalyptic ~ ready to tear down existing structures and shed any amount of blood in the cosmic struggle against evil.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the Coming of the Lord,
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightening of His terrible, swift sword;
His truth is marching on!

I still get a thrill of naughty pleasure out of these words whose images come, literally, right out of the Apocalypse. Apocalyptic thinking is deep in our national DNA.

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free;
Our God is marching on!

Unfortunately, reactionaries have now discovered the heritage and they want to foment a big war in the Middle East ~ nuclear, if possible ~ precisely because apocalyptic scripture appears to predict something so profoundly awful just before Christ comes again. These people ~ hardly the children of the abolitionists or of Martin Luther King, Jr. ~ have this is common: they also have “seen the glory of the Coming of the Lord.”

On the other end of the American spectrum of religious consciousness, are secular materialists, whose scientific observation of the signs of the times leads them to the conclusion that because of human folly, the world really is coming to an end. For them, too, human sin results in cosmic destruction. The same pattern. The difference is that this version of apocalyptic thinking is so literal and concrete that it has no imagination for any glorious redemption on the far side of the cataclysm. I am not suggesting that we minimize the gravity of the situation here. I am observing that the scientific facts fit well into our customary American inclination to apocalyptic narrative.

So does the “War on Terror.” Whatever “Terror” is, it must be spelt with a capital tee. It is a mystical, cosmic Enemy, and War on it is a total war, a war of annihilation. If we do not prevail and destroy it utterly, it will destroy us. Apocalyptic religious consciousness can be traced back to Israel’s encounter with Persian religion. It is dualistic: light and darkness, good and evil in cosmic warfare. There is no middle ground. If you’re not with us you’re against us, and ANYTHING GOES ~ Abu Grahib, Guantánamo, secret prisons and extraordinary rendition, elimination of domestic civil rights ~ there are no rules in total war. (And isn’t it ironic that our biggest worry now is Persia?)

There is a certain vanity in this kind of thinking, a sort of delight in participating in so momentous a time. That may be OK up to a point, I suppose. One should take one’s own time and one’s own life seriously. It is all one has. But on the other hand, it is also possible to take oneself too seriously, crossing the line into fanaticism. ~ John Brown with his broadsword personally slaughtering the wicked slaver settlers in Kansas, the more bloodshed the better, the redemption-in-blood theology of the radical abolitionists, which found its way into Lincoln’s second inaugural speech and is carved in stone in his memorial:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge
of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the
wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil
shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid
by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still
it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Exalted rhetoric, and whether or not it was fanatical depended on which side you were on. And now we have the looney delight in the prospect of nuclear war in the Middle East and the American catastrophe in Iraq.

So, if all scripture is written for our learning, what are we to learn from apocalyptic scripture? Well, what I try to do is to take it seriously, but without fanaticism. Setting aside literal prediction (which was never the intent behind it), I think all three interpretations are useful. Mañana: the world will , literally, end someoday. The sun will explode and consume the earth ~ in a sense falling to earth. Furthermore, even if we humans have succeeded in emigrating by then, there is no escape: the whole universe will eventually collapse. But who knows, maybe humans will be so evolved that we can attach our consciousness to a string or something and bail into another universe. (You see what I mean by apocalyptic and science fiction!). Mañana.

And Now: every human construct is always coming to an end, especially our political arrangements. The world as we know it is always at the End of Time. Tomorrow is NOT just “another day”, as the feudal chatelaine of Tara said, but tomorrow will be radically different, full of menace and promise as Scarlett O’Hara’s probably was, in fact. The Now interpretation means that no earthly order is sacrosanct, permanent, or guaranteed by divine right.

Finally, the existential, individual fact of my own mortality means that whatever may happen to the cosmos, I will shortly encounter the One Like Unto a Son of Man, and then ~ like Daniel ~ rest to rise again for my reward at the end of days. This reflection puts things into perspective. It is inevitable. I can’t change it. My only choice is between the serenity of acceptance and the suffering of Dylan Thomas and his rage, rage against the dying of the light. In this existential apocalyptic, the cosmic catastrophes symbolize all the supports I have built to prop up my ego. They are doomed to ruthless destruction, so that God may be All-in-All. No one can escape, but those who have ears to hear can prepare. Those who are able to learn something from this strange, fascinating scripture may begin now to dismantle their soul’s idols ~ their own, personal, little abominations of desolation ~ so that the Last Judgment will be a setting-right that abolishes every slavery, dissolves every oppression, and opens the door of our human prison, and the collapse of the cosmos will turn into a rebirth into Light and Glory.

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!

# posted by billteska : 4:23 PM

Her whole living ~ all she had to live on ~ in other words, her very life. It would be nice to think that Jesus helped the old woman out, the way Elijah did. That, like the other widow, who fed the Prophet during the famine, her flour jar and oil jug would remain miraculously undiminished. But we don’t know that. She might well have gone home (if she had a home) and starved to death. She probably did. Yet, in saying that “she starved to death,” we reveal our own lack of faith. Clearly, if we really believe what we say we believe, this desperately poor widow ~ and countless like her ~ are the most exalted in God’s Kingdom. The last shall be first and the first last. If she died of starvation, she starved to life, not to death! It is the greedy and tight-fisted who starve to death, including those who give, but only out of their abundance in a calculating, prudential way, reckoning carefully so that their giving doesn’t hurt.


The Church has long-since adopted the list of classical virtues: justice, temperance, fortitude, prudence. But it is hard to find any endorsement for prudence in the gospels. From the rich young man who went away sorrowful because he had much, to the unprofitable servant who hid his talent and returned it intact but without increase, to today’s reckless widow, the Gospel seems to scorn prudence. The widow seems to be anything but prudent. Jesus Christ Himself was anything but prudent, and He did not encourage prudence in His closest disciples. The highest levels of spiritual stardom are not for the prudent, but for the daring, the daring and the reckless, for those who are not counting.

Having said this, I immediately feel the need to equivocate. Material recklessness may not be everyone’s calling, though spiritual recklessness probably is. It’s fine to give up everything and follow Jesus, but even Jesus did not call on everyone to do so. His advice to that young man was advice to that particular young man, and may not have been intended as a general command: Go and sell all that you have and give it to the poor, and follow Me. After all, many of the people He encountered He sent away from following Him ~ not that He condemned them, but neither did He call them. Sometimes, they followed Him anyway, mostly not. Most of those who heard and trusted Him did not follow Him on the road. We are so used to thinking of following Jesus on the way as a metaphor for being a Christian that we err by thinking one size fits all, when it comes to discipleship. We forget about Joseph of Arimathæa and Nicodemus and Simon the Leper and the other Pharisees and rich people of whom Jesus approved ~ none of whom He called to the widow’s kind of recklessness. He approved of her ~ apparently. At least He observed that her gift was greater than the much larger gifts of the abundantly rich; but He did NOT say, now all of you who would be My disciples, go and do likewise.

It is not everybody’s calling. One size does NOT fit all, when it comes to the path of sanctification. Spiritual recklessness may be for everybody, but maybe not necessarily material recklessness. Some must remain householders, not abandoning their families as the inner circle of disciples did. Some must pour out their lives in self-sacrifice for others in less spectacular ways. Some must exercise a certain kind of prudence, and constantly draw the fine distinction between prudence and faithlessness. Some unfortunate ones must even be rulers and possess power and wealth, in the most perilous of spiritual vocations, making the almost impossibly difficult distinction between the exercise of power and attachment to it. Put not your trust in princes, for rich and powerful saints have been known, but they are the rarest of jewels, and the percentage of rulers who were ever saints is extremely small. Camels and needles’ eyes ~ but NOT impossible, with God.

The widow’s recklessness is the most direct route to sanctity (to being like Jesus, in the words of today’s Collect), She put in all she had to live on. She was willing to risk her life. That is the important part. The rich prince, too, may be willing to lose his life, he may in fact be spiritually reckless, but power and possession are so seductive that nothing is more difficult. In a way, it is easier to be an anchorite in the desert. On the other hand, it is also possible for the very poor to be calculating and avaricious. The widow may have been thinking to herself Well, God, here’s all I have. See how much better I am than all those rich scribes and Pharisees! She may have been proud of her poverty (the bitch!); we also don’t know about that. Jesus didn’t say, He only observed that on the Marxist standard of relativity (from each according to his ability), she had given everything ~ 100%, which made her gift greater than the others according to our Lord. We have to read His approval of her inner state into the text.

But it may not be mere sentimentality to observe that the poor are usually more generous and less greedy than the rich. Statistically, that seems to be true. In our sad, declining society, the richer you are, the smaller the percentage of your wealth do you give away. Like the widow, the poor give the highest percentage. And one constantly hears of remarkable generosity observed among the homeless. Those who have nothing often have little sense of ownership or attachment to possessions. To those who have much, more shall be given; and from those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have. A hard saying, unless it be understood contrarily, as a curse upon those who have, since more possession means greater spiritual difficulty, while the poor losing even what little they have may turn out to be the greatest of blessings in the topsy-turvy world of the Reign of God.

Now, I didn’t intend this as a stewardship sermon, when I started out; but if you want to take it as such, feel free. Give wherever you like, but the more you give, the better off you will be. Not just in the next life, but right away. There is something strange and unexpected that happens when you give more than you can really afford ~ when you give till it hurts, as Teresa of Calcutta advised: you find that it hurts only in prospect. In the act, it turns out to be a joy ~ an unexpected joy. That is because you are made in the image of God, and God is, above all, a Giver, Who GAVE His only-Begotten Son. That is a way of saying that God gives more than He ought to, imprudently, recklessly. And when we do the same, we come into sync with who we really are and we have the joy of fulfilling our true purpose. A little bit of recklessness, a little bit of spiritual daring leading to significant material generosity can go a long way in terms of spiritual return. Mere giving by itself, without spiritual recklessness won’t get us very far, unless habitual giving trains us away from attachment. But giving more than we really should can produce miracles: inexhaustible flour-jars and oil-jugs.

The scribes and Pharisees, having made their gifts out of abundance, went home that day as anxious as ever. The widow went home ~ I like to think ~ filled with joy, singing and laughing. The hungry filled with good things; the rich sent empty away.

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!